Recent years have seen widespread acceptance of IC cards with storage areas for accommodating diverse kinds of information written to and read from the suitable areas. One application of such IC cards, taking advantage of their capability for data storage and retrieval, involves recording transport fare values (a sort of electronic money) to the cards for use by passengers in adjusting bus fares.
The scheme works as follows: the platform of each bus is equipped with a fare box device for writing and reading data to and from IC cards. When a passenger of the bus holds up his or her IC card to the fare box device, the device reads a fare value from the card in non-contact fashion and adjusts the passenger's fare by deducting it from the retrieved value of the IC card and updating the remaining fare value.
When recharging the fare value on the IC card, each user pays an increased amount to the bus company or like business operator to have the IC card recharged with a fare value corresponding to the paid amount.
Every time a passenger gets on and off the vehicle, the fare box device acquires the passenger's ride history data by writing and reading such data as the bus stop and the time at which the passenger got on, the bus stop and the time at which the passenger got off, etc., to and from the card.
When passengers have their fares adjusted using IC cards, the receiving and releasing of passengers to and from the vehicle becomes more efficient than before. At the same time, the bus company can acquire the ride history data from the passengers' IC cards and statistically process the obtained data for subsequent use in bus operations.
In order to adjust passengers' fares using IC cards, the bus company must introduce an IC card system as an obvious precondition.
The IC card system, generally expensive, comprises: a fare box device furnished on board each bus; a recharging apparatus set up at each business office (a machine for recharging fare values on IC cards); and a data processing apparatus that connects these apparatuses online or offline for data processing purposes.
If the recharging apparatuses are run only by the bus company, the cost for installing and maintaining the apparatuses can be perceived as particularly high from the company's viewpoint. With only a limited number of locations available for setting up a small number of recharging apparatuses, the passengers who decide to use the IC cards can be inconvenienced considerably.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to overcome the above and other deficiencies of the prior art and to provide an IC card operation system and related equipment for facilitating the introduction of an IC card system.